Sometimes I'd be giving a lecture and at the appropriate point he would say that he was now ripping off his value-free mask.
A mask of very high height and I think we're sort of getting to that point here.
This topic, Historians of the Welfare Warfare State, actually reveals the dialectical cleverness of the Mises Institute.
If you'll notice, the first talk this morning was about the welfare of the state,
then we had one about the warfare state, and now we have the higher synthesis.
So we're reaching the Hegelian moment with this talk.
So I admit it'll be a little bit stream of consciousness and bibliography, but nonetheless,
the phrase welfare, warfare, state, as far as I know, was invented,
it was certainly popularized by Murray Rothbard, and as far as I know,
...first appears in a prize book edited by the Great Society Reader,
and Rothbard contributed a libertarian critique of the Great Society to that mostly New Left book,
and laid out this concept of the welfare warfare state.
And this is a very useful term because it bypasses some of the usual ideological mystification.
In other words, people who think of the state as a genial, sort of friendly society just handing out soup and other goodies sometimes like the state in that aspect and they think the wars are accidental or unrelated to the state and people that like the wars and don't like the welfare can be sold the whole program or that part of the program and so this breaks up
about potential opposition or endorsement of the state and kind of left and right constituencies.
So to go back to my chart from the other day about possible combinations of political economy and foreign policy,
I now am willing to reveal that this is us and them.
So these are all the statists who believe in empire and a large state at home.
These are the laissez-faire liberals.
The laissez-faire liberals who talk a good game of the free market and then support the empire,
which I've argued is not a stable position.
So this is the national review position circa 1960,
whereas the national review position today is somewhere over in here,
in this big statist morass that runs from the neocons over to the unrepentant Stalinists.
Down here we have the autarkic socialists, the sort of nadir people who don't want to trade with anybody
with anybody because they're afraid it leads to complications, and sometimes war, so the best we can say for them is that sometimes they're critics of the welfare warfare state because the welfare warfare state is located here, these are the consistent apologists for this, okay, and some of these right-wingers during the Cold War used to criticize the welfare part but not the warfare part which they loved, and some of the anarchic, or some of the socialists within this
within this coalition, well, they pretty much endorse the whole thing.
These socialists, and here we might put William Mapp and Williams, and Charles Baird is sort of a target corporatist thinker,
are able to see both sides of the coin and be critics.
So these two groups can be critics of the welfare-warfare state.
Okay. Now, among the few exceptions, of course, to the general right-wing position in the Cold War was Murray Rothbard, who didn't like the welfare or the war affair.
He had this admirable consistency, which he shared with just a few other people.
Arthur E. Kirch might be mentioned, who was a classical liberal historian of the period, did a number of general books,
The most famous of which is The Decline of American Liberalism, noticing these connections between...
He also had a very good essay on progressivism in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, sometime around 1979 on the character of the progressive era as being statist in all areas.
Okay. Now, in Rothbard's analysis, he proceeded from what you might call the classical liberal exploitation theory,
the theory that when the state's doing something, there is plunder involved somewhere,
and you just have to find out how the plunder is working.
And this derived from the analysis of people like Cobden and Bright, Bastiat, John C. Calhoun, Franz Oppenheimer,
all people who thought there was something fishy about the state taking money from people
So I want to proceed somewhat chronologically, actually I was looking through Hesiod, I was hoping that Hesiod around the 8th century B.C. had discovered this problem, but I couldn't find anything.
So we'll start with John Bright and I'll proceed chronologically and bring the critics in as they criticize.
John Bright made a famous comment.
Now you have to understand that in Britain they had what was called indoor relief and outdoor relief.
Indoor relief was they put you in this terrible workhouse and made you work.
So it's kind of like a Republican work fair, but about 40 times meaner.
And the other form of outdoor relief was when they didn't make you move into the workhouse
and they just gave you some subsidy of some kind.
And Bright famously said that the entire British Empire was a vast system of outdoor relief
Your Relief for the Landed Gentry, so there's some welfare there, but it's welfare for the Landed class.
It's paradoxical in a way to associate warfare and welfare together because you would think
welfare in principle would just be what benefits people so then you might have the free market and achieve welfare.
And warfare in general seems to be kind of bad.
Doesn't seem like it's much fun for anybody except the generals and the defense contractors.
But nonetheless, this is the problem we have to look at.
Now, I'm going to define welfare very vaguely as sort of any handout that comes from the government to anybody.
This could be welfare for corporations, farmers, urban poor, all sorts of rabble, middle class entitlements and so forth.
but this is all expanded along with the warfare state and some of this is military pensions the more people you have fighting wars the more pensions you have to pay later and so on and with the growth of popular democracy there's more of a need to include a larger body of the population in the welfare side of the warfare state so they remain loyal and committed to the system we see this all through World War one the politicians as I mentioned the other day running on the platform
of Better Houses for Britons, Better Pensions, and the Germans will pay for it, out of the reparations, so that was one approach.
Women's suffrage was suddenly discovered to be absolutely essential during World War I also, various things like this, it may or may not have been, we won't debate the merits.
Okay, so for a larger overview of the whole process, I can recommend a couple of books.
There is, of course, Bruce Porter. I'll just write the names. I have a bibliography of most of this.
Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State. This is about 1994.
It covers much of the same ground as Martin Van Creufelde in his book, I guess it's A Rise and Decline of the State.
Oh, again, some of us are skeptical about the decline part, and this is about 1999.
And I think we could mention our very own Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan, showing how at certain critical episodes the state has taken advantage of the situation to grow,
which is one of the things that states do.
Okay, so now we have Robert Higgs.
The year escapes me, but maybe someone knows.
Anyway, recently.
Okay, we can ask the author.
And so there's a number of books that do see this relationship
between the warfare and the will-fare in a systematic way.
Now, there are some 19th century precedents.
Napoleon III, who's my favorite laughable proto-fascist presidentialist leader,
did make a show of doing some things for the people in general, and did make a show.
That was even more of a show, he made a show of having a foreign policy,
which led him to no good end when he got involved with the Prussians.
So he's maybe not very effective, Napoleon III.
What's more important is Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen,
German-Prussian and then German Reich counselor for a very long time,
presided over the unification of Germany by various military means,
various means fair and foul.
Having done that, wanted to then preserve the European peace,
since he'd created a destabilizing large new state in the heart of Europe.
And to the extent that it can be done, he was pretty good at trying to maintain the peace after he had achieved his goals.
But in a change of his political front, he abandons in 1879 the National Liberals, whom he hadn't liked that much,
and pursues an integrated program based on high tariffs, subsidies to industry,
and the beginnings of the welfare state to cement the loyalties of the workers to the system,
and to try to win them away from the Socialist Party, which is already a big factor, because there's universal manhood suffrage in Germany at this date, despite Mr. Rudy Rummel, who seems to think that this is not a factor in the German situation, there was universal manhood suffrage.
And so this program can be viewed systematically, and I will here mention Mises as one of our historians of this system.
Mises is certainly trained in historical method.
Two of his first essays are empirical studies of the peasant question in Galicia
and the child labor problem in his upper or lower, some part of Austria, child labor problem.
And in Omnipotent Government, he goes into analysis of how he believes
the welfare and the warfare parts of the Bismarckian system fit together.
And I could give you the page references, but I don't have the book in front of me.
But nonetheless, interesting analysis of the connection between militarism and welfarism in the German Reich.
F. A. Hayek also addresses this problem in the Road to Serfdom for a chapter or two,
the way in which real liberalism was squeezed out of the German political spectrum
by a convergence of all of these socialists and militarists into social militarists.
And next, much more recently, Ralph Reiko in his book Departite de Freiheit has described the welfare and warfare sides and the unity of this process in late 19th century Germany.
The chapter on Friedrich Naumann, aside from being a total demolition of Naumann, is very illustrative of these winds of doctrine which Naumann sort of embodies.
always going around calling himself a national social, which isn't quite, it's a step away
from another term, national social. So that's interesting. Unfortunately, this book is so
far only in German, but one of the, I think some of the essays are available in English
and you might ask Professor Reiko about that. Now we turn to Britain in the late 19th century
and there I will mention there's a series of books by Bernard Semmel and one of these is called
Imperialism and Social Reform which is exactly what you'd expect and then there's one the rise
of free trade imperialism and there's a recent one Semmel gets actually he's not each book doesn't
seem to be as good as the previous book now he's come down to saying well there was an analysis of
Imperialism by various writers.
And gosh, it seems like you'd either have to accept
the market economy or not accept it,
but he'd rather have protectionism for some reason.
So he's become a left protectionist, I don't know why.
But this first book, Imperialism and Social Reform,
is very good in discussing the coalescence
between elements in the English political spectrum,
which included the Fabians, people like Bernard Shaw
and the ineffable Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
who are having discussions with high Tories about how to build an efficient Britain,
an organized, efficient, kind of militarized, but socially friendly British Empire.
Joseph Chamberlain might be mentioned in the Milner Group in this connection,
the Milner Group having just lately been reorganizing South Africa.
So I had to have some experience.
So you have the social imperialism everywhere, this kind of combination of nationalism and socialism,
Now we turn to the United States and more historians.
We too had people who were aware of the systematic relationship between the expansion of the state at home and abroad,
and who were in fact social imperialists and social militarists.
Unfortunately, we refer to them as reformers.
We refer to these people as progressives.
Teddy Roosevelt somehow comes to mind. I mean, here's the man who wants to wave his big stick and also bust the trusts and uplift the working men with tariffs, the high tariffs, which is the cause of American prosperity, all this sort of good stuff.
And I have here a quote, if someone didn't liberate the book from me. Well, I had the quote.
Oh, I'm sorry, I've got a photocopy. I'm just not paying attention.
But a quote from John W. Burgess, who was a progressive, but like a lot of people, he had second thoughts.
This is going around lately, second thoughts. You might look at my review of the Ronald Radosh book.
And this is from his book, Reconciliation of Government with Liberty. Well, all I can say is good luck.
But anyway, 1915, and he's disillusioned with Teddy Roosevelt.
David Gordon tells me that Teddy was a former student of this fellow.
Anyway, Burgess says this in 1915, the jingo.
Okay, you know what jingos are. These are people that are always cheering for war.
The jingo and the social reformer have gotten together and have formed a political party
which threatened to capture the government and use it for the realization of their program of Caesaristic paternalism,
a danger which now appears to have been averted only by the other parties
having themselves adopted this program in a somewhat milder degree and form
referring, I suppose, to Woodrow and such people
all parties are now declaring themselves to be progressives
and all mean in substance the same thing by this claim, namely
the increase of governmental power over the constitutional immunities of the individual
the solution by force of the problems of the social relations heretofore regulated by influence
by Religion and Conscience, Charity and Human Feeling,
The Substitution of the Club of the Policeman
for the Crozier of the Priest,
the Supercession of Education, Morals and Philanthropy
by Administrative Ordinance.
And of course, he's already mentioned the jingoism
in foreign affairs.
John W. Burgess, The Reconciliation of Government
with Liberty, 1915.
So he's a disillusioned progressive. He's having second thoughts anyway. So he's interesting. He's a contemporary critic of a mild one.
Of Teddy Roosevelt, A. H. L. Mencken tended to say that he was crazier than the Kaiser. Kaiser Wilhelm II. He was our equivalent of the Kaiser.
Now, there are a number of new left writers who reanalyzed the progressive era from the late 1950s,
certainly into the 70s, before one or two of them had second thoughts and then their work isn't as good since then.
But James Weinstein might be mentioned.
These are largely the people grouped around William Apple Williams at the University of Wisconsin.
and I'll just abbreviate W-A-W, this is William Appleman Williams, there's no problem spelling that, James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko, he's sort of independent of them but he talks about the progressive era as a process of cartelization and he also writes books on foreign policy of imperialism so he knows the phenomena are related, oh see there's James W. Aikens, there's a number of these guys writing from this point of view so they're sort of in a way coming
They're coming out of this camp here. They're the friendlier socialists who don't want to have an imperilous foreign policy.
And so they're good critics because they can see the two halves and they're critical of the welfare state if only because it isn't socialism.
And so they think it's an inadequate approach.
Now, a contemporary critic I should have mentioned is William Graham Sumner, who wrote the famous essay, The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
We're talking about the Progressive Era, we have to mention the Spanish-American War.
So William Graham Sumner, contemporary critic.
Okay, that's just to add drama.
And Charles Baird actually, in 1939 in his America in Mid-Passage,
looked back at the imperialist episode in the Spanish-American War and said,
well, there might have been some profit in the China market and the foreign markets
Walter Carp, a sort of an amateur historian, has an interesting book describing the origins of the Spanish-American War and World War I in the same book, which he regards as a complete departure from republican forms of government.
and he puts most of the blame on the political parties and certainly they deserve a great deal of the blame.
The two-party oligarchy as he likes to call it.
There's also an interesting essay by Robert Zevin which I have the reference in the footnotes to my current article in JLS.
Robert Zevin makes an interesting point that the jingos and the social reformers had always been together
and notes that one consequence of the Spanish-American war was that we sent great hordes of bureaucrats, uplifters, social workers, and Yankee school marms to the Philippines to make up for killing off about 200,000 Filipinos during the so-called Philippine insurrection, so we were now going to heal them having gotten the discipline part out of the way. So it is a unified process. Many people were quite idealistic. People who weren't
didn't think it was enough to go build settlement houses in New York City and uplift the poor there would go to the Philippines and uplift them so it's interesting okay World War I this should be passed over in decent silence but nonetheless it's awful World War I is the great high point for this stuff in other words there's a sort of gradual rise of status and you can have 1850s and there's a sudden spike with Abraham Lincoln levels off well never
World War I is tremendous in terms of combining the welfare and the warfare state and expanding
the state in both areas.
And here the interesting thing is the debate between John Dewey, who is a horrible progressive
and generally evil character, John Dewey, coming out of the post-millennial Protestant
business again and then deciding to throw out the sentimental stuff about religion.
So you have Dewey and of course he and all the other guys that hang around the Evil New
Republic magazine, and I think I can call it evil without any debate here, like The
War, they think The War is great and they see The War is a wonderful opportunity to
implement their program.
And almost their sole, one of their few critics is Randolph Byrne who wrote the famous essay
The War and the Intellectuals trying to explore why these people should want the war and like
the war and the way in which they thought it would help them realize their program,
which it did.
Now there was a myth spread in the decades there after World War I that none of the poor
progressives they were reforming and uplifting and making society better and the war came
came along and spoiled it.
And reactionaries temporarily came into power because of the war and stopped all of these
further reforms.
Well, this might have been a position of a few people further to the left of the main
body of progressives, but the progressives as such were pretty happy.
The war, in fact, was the fulfillment of their program.
And this, of course, is the title of a famous essay by Murray Rothbard in the Journal of
of Libertarian Studies, which I don't have here, but I have references available.
I can give it to anybody that wants it, and we have the JLSs in the library.
Famous essay by Rothbard in which he says, well, this is a myth.
Clearly, this was their opportunity.
In fact, they're unhappy when the war is over because then things go back
farewell to relative normalcy, to use that Republican word, and they're frustrated.
And all the wartime planners like Baruch are waiting for a new crisis so they can
and reintroduced corporatism and revived something like the War Industries Board in peacetime,
which of course they get in the depression.
Now, I should footnote this by saying that this whole process,
we could sort of subsume this whole process
under what Professor Gottfried calls the rise of the managerial,
I can't read that really, but the managerial ideology
or managerial practice, public administration,
in which case we can create an interesting ideological link back to August Comte
and the positivist is some of the first conscious ideologists
of this lovely system.
Okay, now forging ahead,
we notice that Rothbard running through this whole discussion,
of course, Rothbard seems to have a good essay
or several on any period that we could discuss.
So you can almost put together a book of these essays
and have the real history of the recent century.
Okay, well now we have the approach to World War II
and of course the actuality of World War II,
once it's approached and there it is.
And there were a number of writers, of course,
who spotted the welfare warfare state trend in World War II
and John T. Flynn, who was a journalist of some merit
and wrote on these things, not strictly a historian,
but nonetheless quite interesting.
John T. Flynn wrote a book called Country Squire in the White House.
By the way, it's a mistake.
A lot of these right-wingers like to say that Roosevelt was a traitor to his class.
This isn't true.
Roosevelt was not an industrial capitalist.
Roosevelt was a member of the landed gentry, so you can almost see him as the kind of English
Tory radical.
He's got a social superiority over the capitalists, and so he can move to their left and in
and convenience them with his policies.
That might be the case.
I think Forrest MacDonald sometimes
entertains this notion about Roosevelt.
So in 1940, he writes Country Squire in the White House.
And he says the interesting thing is the New Deal is stalled.
And to try to keep the economy going,
they're resorting to military spending,
trying to stimulate the economy.
And he gives reasons why this might be.
So again, the welfare and the warfare side's sort of meshing.
and he thinks this is rather ominous.
Now, of course, the war duly arrives and we're in the war.
In 1944, he writes his most interesting book, perhaps,
which is As We Go Marching,
about how at the rate this war is proceeding,
we'll come out of the war almost as fascist
as some of the powers on the other side.
Because of conscription, general climate of militarism,
he already mentions a kind of imperialist psychology
that's set in economic controls, which in his mind amount to a kind of corporative system and so forth, so it's a very interesting account.
He kept writing this kind of stuff in the post-war period, which is why I think someone said he famously had a manuscript returned by William F. Buckley,
who didn't want to hear all this sentimental stuff about how there could be too much military spending,
So he didn't get published by National Review after that.
Okay, so there's a number of critics during and just after the war.
I'll mention also Garrett, who in the early 50s writes this pamphlet saying that we have crossed the threshold
that lies between republic and empire.
Very short, but interesting, pithy, odd style that he writes in a kind of a nomic style,
kind of aphoristic or something saying that there are people who are waiting for the revolution that they think is coming and the revolution, I think he says, has already gone by.
It went down the road some years ago singing Hoseannas to Freedom.
The revolution within the forum had already occurred and we no longer had a republic and this, of course, was the work of the New Deal.
Okay, of course also, and just after the war, Charles Beard, the great Charles Beard,
the great progressive historian, and was writing critical books on Roosevelt's foreign policy
just after the war, and dismissed as a senile old fool by the historical profession.
Of course, Harry Elmer Barnes, a very feisty, and still something of a progressive, but hated the wars.
Harry Labarnes, we kind of put him in this camp with the autarkic progressives, was writing at least putting together symposium, symposia against the war like perpetual war for perpetual peace, and from another quarter altogether, Charles Callan Tansel, sort of pro-confederate Catholic historian, also calling into question some aspects of Roosevelt's foreign policy, like the idea that they had no idea the Japanese might think of bombing Pearl Harbor,
I don't remember if they expect the Japanese to bomb something else or, anyway, looking into that interesting problem, okay, now, there's an interesting body of literature on wartime planning, and you look at the literature on wartime planning, you see that, and this is while we're still an ally of dear old Uncle Joe, and people are assuming maybe we'll get along with this monster after the war, so there's not really an Uncle Joe problem yet, but they're already projecting
huge amounts of American military spending, overseas bases, a virtual American empire without any reason.
You know, you defeat the Axis enemy and it's supposed to be a better world.
But they're already projecting this larger military and I tend to say, well,
clearly this has something to do with what William F. Williams and his school refer to as open-door empire.
That is this neo-mercantilist conception of trade in which the government goes out and beats down barriers to trade
and hopes the capitalists and that's the only thing
that will make the economy boom.
Apparently the economy would collapse
without this particular form of corporate welfare
in the foreign trade sphere.
So again, Akins and Williams and some other people
contributed essays and a very interesting book
called The Corporations and the Cold War
edited by David Horowitz before he had his second thoughts
and then he had too few, I think, in some ways.
But that can happen, but now he would totally repudiate, I suppose, most of what he wrote, and yet he did a good deed by editing this book, because it tells us a lot in the essays about the wartime planning.
There's also, Noam Chomsky has a short essay on this topic, and so does James J. Martin.
Okay, but a really central essay is the one by Murray Rothbard.
And this is on New Deal foreign economic policy,
that is monetary policy, the foreign policy of a New Deal
in relation to money.
Remember we've gone off the gold standard,
adopted basically a Keynesian model
of how the economy has to be run.
And now we want to be able to export our inflation.
Dr. Hoppe talked about this whole thing yesterday.
And there are certain powers that aren't cooperating.
They're kind of bypassing the New York, London banking system,
the Anglo-American banking system.
And one of these fellows is Hitler, who says,
well, these guys have rigged the international banking system
against all of us aspiring powers,
Oppressed Peoples and so forth.
And so we're just going to bypass the credit system altogether.
We're going to barter.
So they say to the Bulgarians, well, we'll give you, you know,
5,000 tons of shoes for 12,000 tons of potatoes or something.
These big barter agreements sort of worked out.
It's hard to believe they can be very economic.
But nonetheless, it bypassed the credit markets.
And this so angers the American administration.
And they're also angry about Italian and German competition
for Markets in Latin America, which is supposed to be our sphere of influence.
By about 1938, they're seriously ready to go to war with these powers, and of course
there is no war.
The war hasn't broken out.
I mean, war doesn't break out until September of 1939.
These guys have already made the decision, basically, that if there's a war, they're
going to be in it on the side of Britain.
So that might be contingency planning, but you have to understand why they are thinking
about this.
I was a really military danger to the continental United States.
They were saying, well, there's certain interests
that we're pursuing.
Same thing with Japan and the Pacific.
We've had this delusion about the China market,
you know, sell every Chinaman a pair of shoes
and that's quite a few shoes.
And so we don't like the Japanese carving out
their sphere of influence in China
because we've got our sphere of influence
but that's different.
Latin America is entirely different.
Okay, so you could be cynical, I guess,
or you can find it amusing. I think Dr. Higgs mentioned that.
Okay, so the Rothbard essay is in a collection edited by James Martin and Leonard Ligio.
This is about 1970s. I can't spell Ligio today.
1976, called The Watershed of Empire.
There are some copies in this library. I think it's out of print.
The essay by Rothbard will be reprinted in a new book to be published by the Mises Institute, which is Rothbard's essays on monetary history.
Okay, now there's a final sally about World War II.
How did the other side see it? How did these guys, you know, the them, the status squared here, how did they see the relationship of warfare and welfare?
Well, Harry Hopkins, FDR's great factotum and errand boy and general all-around advisor,
Harry Hopkins said that World War II was a great crusade for the universal New Deal.
Everyone should have the New Deal.
And it was essentially the common man, and he was going to bring the common man the New
Deal whether the common man wanted it or not, I guess.
So it was a great crusade.
So it is the universal New Deal.
This is a theme that reappears in some of LBJ's speeches during the Vietnam War where
where he keeps trying to tell a Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to lay down their arms
because he wants to build them a TVA on the Mekong River Delta.
And they'll be as happy as the people whose homes are sometimes flooded by TVA, or were, at one time.
So I don't know, so there's an interesting, but it's perfect progressive thinking.
You've got the welfare and the warfare elements inextricably intertwined.
Okay, so now we fast forward to the Cold War. Oh wait, I've got to mention one more thing.
A couple of interesting essays in the 70s by, I think it's John Garrity. I don't know if there's
enough T's, he might have two T's, but I have the references if anybody wants it. And also an essay
by William Luchtenberg, kind of talking about whether the New Deal was corporatist, you know,
and whether it resembles any European systems in any fundamental way.
This is what the old right critics all said in the 30s and 40s.
They said, well, really, the New Deal is more like fascism in terms of economic policy than it is communism.
Later on in the Cold War, it became convenient to say, well, it's communism rather than fascism.
So there was an interesting structural implication.
And what's interesting is that I think in the Lechtenberg's article in the American Historical Review,
He has some pictures and there's some discussion of the WPA and all the guys marching around with shovels to plant trees and they're sort of in military formation and it reminds me of a certain film made in Germany in the 30s where the guys are marching around in uniform and they have uniforms on and military drill but they're all they're going to do is plant trees so it's very nice, it's welfare, it's sort of ecologically nice but they're in uniform for some reason and have a military structure
The Cold War was prevalent because the Cold War had no apparent end. The Cold War really was a sort of perpetual war for perpetual peace that Harry Elmer Barnes talked about.
I mean, there's no telling when it might end, and it became a great kind of Manichaean cosmic struggle at the level of ideology and everything.
And again, blown out of proportion to any actual threats, people have compared the things that these generals said in private to what they said in public.
I think there's a famous thing about Lucius Clay, I believe it was, saying that the Soviets might roll into Western Europe next week.
and they asked him later why he said that and he said,
well, you know, we needed the appropriation
and my superiors needed me to say something inflammatory.
So this sort of thing happened all the time.
So the whole thing is blown entirely out of proportion.
One could argue in fact that poor Stalin,
this horrible monster Stalin, such as he was,
was really not in the best shape to roll over anything.
I mean, they'd rolled into Eastern Europe
in the course of defeating the other people, the other side.
And, but this is an exhausted country with virtually no economy.
It's taken enormous casualties in the course of the war.
Not leaving aside the enormous casualties already inflicted by Stalin himself
before the war on the Russians and Ukrainian people.
They needed a break. Stalin wanted to rebuild his economy such as it was.
And he's begging for Western loans. Now, a lot of people think this is a soft position.
My attitude is we should have loaned him the money and he might have,
I don't know if this would have rendered him peaceful, but the idea that we'd waste the money is that there's no point in worrying about that.
Consider all the other money we wasted, the much larger sums of money, we might as well have tried that.
And since they've already got the money anyway, they've already taken the money from the people,
they might as well try this policy, that doesn't work, then they can have a crusade and militarize everything.
They might as well have, because wasting money can hardly be an argument in this context.
So the Cold War was perfect, because the Cold War was the perfect fusion of the welfare and the warfare state.
Everything was for the Cold War. You want school lunches? Well, you have to have healthy people to win the Cold War.
You want physical education? Well, you have to be able to do more push-ups than Ivan.
Okay, you want integration? Well, we have to integrate so that the nice non-aligned third world despotisms and dictatorships and hellholes will like us better and not become aligned with the Soviets.
You want any possible policy? You want big highways? Well, you have to build the interstate highway system, another interesting leveling, centralizing process based on the autobahns apparently.
Well, we have to have those. We're going to have to move the troops around on these interstate highways when the communists come ashore at Pismo Beach.
You don't know, and Bugs Bunny can't defend the place by himself.
So everything can be justified. So you had this sort of false social consensus.
Everything was thrown in the hopper. You need more education? Well, it'll be a defense education bill.
Whatever it could have been. You know, you want better shoes? Well, there'll be a defense shoe bill. It was endless.
And of course, this brings us to the military and industrial, some people say Congressional complex.
And this is quite interesting. By the way, I would mention that the committee chairman referred to,
tended to be Southerners because of their longevity on the committees and the one party system.
I would tend in my present position to think of them as maybe Scalawags in some way,
but we don't need to go into that.
Anyway, so you have this huge complex that even Eisenhower complained about as he was leaving office.
And a number of analysts talked about this, and I'll mention them before I...
How am I doing on time? Okay.
Well, as I understand it, the infamous National Security Council Memo 68 has actually finally been...
It was declassified sometime in the late 70s, so we certainly could look at that.
C. Wright Mills, although he was a bit undisciplined in his rhetoric at times,
had a lot to say about the Cold War and talked about crackpot realism, as Dr. Higgs pointed out,
had a book called The Causes of World War III.
And in fact, he's one of the few people in the whole period in his Causes of World War III,
which was regarded as the dangerous leftist book,
One of the few people to actually criticize terror bombing, which had been done in Korea on the model of the World War II bombing.
One of the few people, I think, Richard Weaver.
Otherwise it's a couple of maverick conservatives that complain about terror bombing.
Felix Marley, people like that.
So Mills is interesting.
Again, William Apple Williams, as a critic of this emerging system,
which he refers to as corporate syndicalism combined with the open door empire.
Of course, Rothbard is developing his critique in this period and so forth.
There's a political scientist named Howard Wiarda.
I looked at a mountain of this literature on corporatism,
and all these writers, they're political scientists.
They don't want to give the Americans any corporatism.
They say, oh, no, it's not corporatism because you don't have a pillarized
and pelletized and organized system like they have in the Netherlands or Sweden.
So you can't call it, you have corporatism.
It's just a bunch of pluralistic intervention.
And this is why, what was your term, quasi-corporatism?
So they say it's a loose corporatism.
Well, fine, but what we are does, one of the few exceptions,
he says, well, there was loose corporatism,
but under Eisenhower,
because Republicans are a little friendlier,
they have different business interests in their corner
than the Democrats do.
Under Eisenhower, he believes there's a sudden period
of galloping corporatism in the framework
of the Cold War system.
So we do have some, apparently, these cozy deals with defense contractors and subsidiary contractors and so on,
which certainly would distort markets and all sorts of things you might complain about in this government-business partnership.
Okay. And there was a nursing paper from the early 1970s by Robert Bresler, reprinted,
Again, a Political Scientist reprinted in the collection edited by Kenneth Templeton.
What is that? A Politicization of Society, about 1977, Institute for Human Studies,
has essays by John Lukash, Murray Rothbard, Bill Marina, all sorts of people, too numerous to remember.
But has this, I think the piece by Bresler has been reprinted in there about the rise of the executive state,
Again, exactly paralleling the arguments of people like Ben Creffold and Bruce Porter,
the executive playing a more important role in this system.
Okay, well then the Soviets had the bad manners to collapse.
Took away our enemy. There's no Soviets anymore and there's this sort of frantic substitute truce.
The search for substitute enemies had some success, not much.
And it leads us back to some interesting observations,
and here I'll mention two writers
who are in favor of the welfare warfare state,
or at least they're in favor of the welfare part,
so they're willing to put up with the warfare part.
And these are these political scientists,
I think it's, I've got the reference,
I can't remember the guy's first name,
but it's Dudney and Eikenberry.
And they wrote an interesting article
on Foreign Policy in 1994.
Foreign Policy is a journal that's competing now
with foreign affairs, it's only a few years old.
And in 1994, they wrote this article
called After the Long War.
And they're saying in effect,
oh, it's awful, it's horrible.
Cold War is over.
We can't justify all these programs.
Why, we could sneak in five social programs a week before
because of the Cold War.
And suddenly this wonderful consensus is gone.
And will the presidency weaken? Will the central government wither?
Why, it's just a horrible prospect for them.
So of course I thought this was wonderful
and I use it as a basis of one of my columns,
you know, saying this is a happy prospect.
If it ever works out that way, I'll buy these guys a bear.
And so far it hasn't really gotten very far
because the state has found other ways
to justify its existence.
And this leads us to the Gottfriedian problem
that possibly the state, indeed having grown up
All this welfareism and statism at home, having grown up, kind of written piggyback on the
war process, perhaps it has transcended the military origins, and Bruce Porter mentions
this possibility in his book that possibly the state has now transcended the military
origins, people are used to it.
And this is, of course, what Professor Gottfried worries about, and Martin Van Creffeld might
be too optimistic about.
I have a quote in this connection.
Now this is an old right industrialist, earnest wearer.
He was a president of U.S. Steel, I think that's the company, U.S. Steel Company, and
he says this in 1951.
He says, as it is, we hear too little from our leadership that is positive and constructive.
We are told that we must prepare to endure five to 10 to 20 years of tension.
That means it would have been over in 1971. That would have been nicer.
20 years of tension, of expanding government and government costs, of widening government controls,
of high taxes, of military service for our youth, of a Garrison State economy.
Think what this will mean. It will mean the end, by the end of 20 years, if it does end then,
We will have had two whole generations of Americans who have never had the opportunity to know the real America.
They will have no experience with the real individual independence.
That may just can't be great, but on the contrary, they will accept as an accustomed thing,
the detailed control over their private lives by a powerful central government.
Well, I think that was an interesting warning, all too true.
So my final comment is simply that rather than protecting us from Hobbes' war of all against all,
the welfare-warfare state produces it and produces as much of it as we will put up with.
Unless I just missed it, you did not mention the GI Bill.
Oh, it's in my notes and I just sometimes you just skip over something, but that's an important welfare aspect that's tied to the military thing and it seems to me that it's a great illustration of the whole process, yes.
Did you read Tom DiLorenzo's piece, The Truth About the G.I. Bill?
No, but I will.
I can see it would fit very nicely into this whole thing.
Anyone else?
Yeah, I guess it means we're in complete agreement.
We can leave early.
Yes.
I want to go back to Gareth, because I think on many of us at that time, he was a very strong influence.
He was a well-known journalist in style. I thought this trilogy that he wrote, and he did campus...
Yeah, put together as the... and then put together as the People's Potage.
And John Birch Society has kept this thing in print forever, so it's actually a good thing they've done there.
But the people's prodigy implies that, well, the American people have sold their fundamental independence and their local self-government and so forth for the illusion of security or maybe even sometimes some real security, but nonetheless he thinks it's a bad, bad trade.
And the essays are entitled, see, The Revolution Was, which is his analysis of how the New Deal came and made this revolution within the political form, somewhat like Octavian keeping out the republican forms in Rome.
The Revolution was, let's see, yeah, ex-America, continuing these themes, and then the Empire one, but the exact, what's the exact title of the Empire essay?
Rise of Empire? Yeah, Rise of Empire. So it's tied together. Here we have the analysis of the increasing state power in terms of dispensing welfare and comfort, but also in terms of foreign entanglements.
He makes the excellent point that as strong as Roosevelt was with his backing in Congress and so forth,
he had a hell of a time trying to commit the country to an unpopular war.
A few years later, an unpopular president, Harry Truman, without so much as asking, you know,
buy your leave, committed this to a war in Korea and somehow didn't get impeached.
So Garrett thought this showed that the institutional damage was quite great by 1950 and he's also got a very interesting discussion of the relationship between Congress and the military and military spending, how it will tend to go up and you can frighten Congress into spending all this money later on it became business as usual based on this insider beltway exchange of ideas at the public expense.
So I'm trying to think what else I can say. So he's an interesting old right guy. I think he's probably a mild protectionist, but then you had a little bit of that on the old right.
But he's very forthright on the notion that Republican government is being stolen out from under us, and this is a tragedy, and people are losing their independence.
He'd written some novels in the 20s, which I won't go into, but about some of these themes of free enterprise versus social reformers, yes.
I was going to say, in earlier work, he actually advocated total cut-off of all foreign trade to prevent foreign entanglement.
You know, the wars followed, you know, foreign trade, and there were really convincing arguments.
So he's sort of like an autarkic capitalist, so we could put him partly in this camp then, I guess, okay, with the autarkic. That's interesting.
I don't know if that was always his view, but it looks like that.
It looks to me as though later on he became only, he became a mild protectionist as opposed to an autarkist.
But very interesting figure who writes with this kind of autonomic style, it's hard to replicate, but has an interesting rhythm, kind of hypnotic kind of read.
One thing you might think of, could you discuss the role of the foundation for economic education and fee and let it read in regard to combining free-form economics with anonimic invention as far as policy?
That's it. Rothbard and a small number of other people on the same side. That is, in this camp, the camp that does combine laissez-faire liberalism and a peaceful foreign policy, I certainly should mention Reed.
In fact, he had a number of famous pamphlets from that period that Rothbard quoted in his polemics against the Cold War right-wingers later. So we have Leonard Reed.
And I guess most of this group around fiat, or very many of them, continued the old right orientation in foreign policy.
And they like to point out things like high military spending would tend to produce inflation,
or inflation would be used to fund some of this or be ulcerative economic consequences,
and the markets would become increasingly regulated and so forth.
What were your theories in the pre-call for a professional committee and subject to this very nasty interrogation? Did that happen? Did you shut down all pre-interviews for the United States before all of this?
I don't see in the early days of shorter office before they talked about it.
I don't know the date, I just would assume it's in the mid-50s, but it could be earlier.
I should mention somebody else, again in this respect, a couple of these guys are entirely hardcore.
And this has to do with Frank Chodorow, whose newsletter analysis with a small a was started, I think, in 1944 and continued into at least 1951.
This is one of the places where Rothbard was first published.
Rothbard reviewed Human Action in this little four-page, big, big pages like newspaper size and so on.
And he was always a hardcore isolationist, anti-interventionist.
And the other publication, Human Events, which has gone through some changes,
Human Events, founded again in the last part of the war,
and then succumbing to Cold War ideology by about 1953,
well, maybe a little bit later, but succumbing to the Cold War point of view.
But here you had Felix Morley and Frank Chudorov carrying on the same fight.
And on the left you had, correspondingly on the left, you had politics,
a strange journal called Politics on the left to kind of pro-peace,
where C. Wright Mills and Dwight MacDonald are a number of people, yes.
The question is, how did some of these people end up as friends of Bill Buckley?
He showed her off with his friend Buckley, and Buckley wrote this very fashionable literary.
In contrast, the very nasty words that he wrote about Murray Rothbard.
Ah, Buckley, yes.
How did he get that friendship? How did he form, and how did he make it?
Okay, well, my friend of mine has a theory about this.
A friend of mine who's a lawyer, who got sick of being a lawyer,
He says in a way he thinks that Albert J. Nock had two disciples. One of them took the aristocratic pose from Nock, and I guess who that might be, and the other took the real ideology. That would be Chotarov, but maybe it's the connection to Nock that made it possible.
or maybe Buckley's immense charm.
I've always thought it would be an amazing visual spectacle to have him interview Mick Jagger.
There'd be a war of tongues on the television, but nonetheless, maybe it's his charm, yes.
The guy who was the facilitator of the change in human events from his older right to his
We're not even a good disciple, then, at this point.
The guy who was the facilitator of the change in human events from its own right ownership to a new right ownership of the William J. Casey,
who was this man's later CIA director, was a lawyer who appropriated actions for him.
Now he's controlling his internal affairs.
Yes, I wouldn't find that suspicious.
Interesting, fascinating.
In the blue book of the John Birch Society, Welsh, when was that published, the blue book?
1958.
He was reading, I remember reading that at the height of when the communists were there,
Nick of Rockman said, oh boy, he's got it so wrong, and actually he got it so right.
He was saying that the Soviets had baby as a slave empire, no way were they ever going
Are they ever going to attack us? Because when they did, the slave nations would rise up against them and that the danger was in Washington, D.C. and he laid that out very beautifully.
And as I say, I was so sure he was wrong back then.
Well, that was the problem with Welch. He had a couple of points he clung to and would make all the time that were obviously not right.
so it was easy for Buckley to purge him from the coalition but then he didn't
but the Berkshires didn't have this real kind of desire to get out of Vietnam, Lew.
I was going to say that's of course why Buckley purged them.
Yeah, they had this latent isolationism.
You know, you mentioned the Eisenhower business and so forth.
It's actually Welch's criticism of the war in Vietnam that is the reason for Buckley wanting to get rid of them.
Yeah, I'm sure this.
I wrote in my book on conservative movement for a long time,
which I'm going to be dedicating to David Gordon here,
about the break-with between Pockley and the John Burt Society,
and indeed it is openly one that you've known.
Oh, yeah.
That makes perfectly good sense, because again,
they're really closer to this position than that position.
Well, I suppose that's sufficient then.
Unless there's one more? Okay. Well, we all agree then, more or less.